Tuesday, October 9, 2007

You're Never Fully Dressed Without One

I suck, readers. And, no, not in a good way, though God knows I try, at least occasionally. I mean that I was working on an entry, and the entry sucked. It started out okay (and by "okay," I mean that it had my trademark inability to end a sentence without abusing at least seven prepositions and/or conjunctions):

If you're familiar with the 1993 action movie Point of No Return, you will doubtless remember a scene where Anne Bancroft (as a CIA veteran) is instructing Bridget Fonda (as a young assassin-in-training). Ms. Bancroft is telling Ms. Fonda that if things ever get very difficult, it helps to have a phrase to fall back on, to allow oneself to pretend that one is not as rattled as one, in fact, is. Ms. Fonda's phrase is "I never did mind about the little things," which to this day remains the phrase of choice any time you happen to find yourself in the company of Harvey Keitel.

You are, of course, welcome to make "I never did mind about the little things" your own catch phrase, but bear in mind that a) it's already been done, b) you're not likely ever to need it as much as Ms. Fonda did, and c) she only needed one phrase, but you don't have either her skills or her body, so you'll need more.

I believe that the idea of developing a set of ten phrases such that one of them will be an appropriate response in any conversational setting has tremendous merit. But when I got into the details, I found that I probably wasn't up to the task in the time I had to work on it. I got a few phrases in, and then I thought, "Hey, what if all of the ten phrases are phrases from musicals!" which is when I realized that trying to write a blog entry at midnight when you didn't get home from the office until 11 pm is probably a bad, bad idea because I DO NOT talk in show tunes, except for "I'm always true to you, darling, in my fashion," which, for obvious reasons, both b&c and I find highly useful. (Also, "All I can say is if I were a bell I'd be ringing," does have tremendous conversational currency, especially if you can use it both with and without irony.) So while I do believe that "What this really needs is bacon" (or m&ms, as appropriate) and "I understand it's very popular in Europe" probably are eventual parts of the conversational core, I'm afraid that significantly more cogitation is required on my part to bring you the high level of meaningless drivel that you've come to expect.

As for the pictures, well, again quoting myself:

Today's pictures, by the way, are all of smiling men. In part because any man worth knowing is at least forty percent sexier when he's smiling (A man who's convinced that he looks sexiest when he's giving you a smoldering stare is, at best, worth knowing for ninety minutes. In a Biblical sense. Preferably in a position where you don't have to look at his face and can just listen to him shout about seeing God), but also because most things you say will work better if you can find it in yourself to smile. There are one or two exceptions, but they'll be obvious.

As you may have surmised, the pictures were meant to go between the ten essential sentences. Besides, at midnight, it's a lot easier to download pictures than to write comprehensible prose. For now, you can just enjoy the smiling faces. If you like, you can fantasize about all of them. Except for the monk, you understand. He's mine, bitches, and if he shows up in your daydreams, I will be forced to cut you. Regretfully, of course.

By the way, after the idea for this failed entry occurred to me, I did manage to score the DVD of Point of No Return for $7.95, including postage. So while the exercise was a bust for you, at least it worked out for me. Also, I'm going to Italy in two days, and you're not.

3 comments:

"Point of No Return" was great, but so was the original "La Femme Nakita" (The French movie, not the Canadian TV show)Two great cooped phrases you can use at will:"I have no response to that" (Meg Ryan in Joe vs. The Volcano)"I'm not really into Pokemon" (from xkcd cartoons)